Mary Matalin helps turn the pages

Mary Matalin’s official title at Threshold Editions is editor-in-chief, but the Republican strategist prefers several others: conservative, book-lover, fixer.

It’s that last role where Matalin’s extensive network comes into play for Simon & Schuster’s 4-year-old conservative imprint, now slated to publish memoirs by both former Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. Matalin’s connections also played a part in a publishing-industry coup earlier this month, as Threshold simultaneously held the top spots on The New York Times best-seller list for hardcover and paperback nonfiction — Mark Levin’s “Liberty and Tyranny” and Glenn Beck’s “Common Sense,” respectively.

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But success didn’t come overnight to Threshold, which Simon & Schuster launched after Penguin and Random House started their own conservative imprints, Sentinel and Crown Forum. And while Threshold is riding high now, the wave of anti-Obama book-buying could wane just as Bush-era official memoirs are hitting the shelves.

The Cheneys, for Matalin, are like family. Lynne Cheney and her daughter Mary are both Threshold authors. So it’s natural that Dick knocked around book ideas with Matalin in his McLean, Va., home before settling on a publisher. There, Matalin said the vice president offered up some “jaw-dropping” anecdotes for the book that she had never heard in the years she worked for him. Bob Barnett, the D.C. uber-lawyer who represents Rove, Matalin and countless media figures, said that while he can’t speak for the vice president in making a final decision, Matalin’s presence at Threshold “is very reassuring.”

And Rove, who’s turning in his manuscript to Simon & Schuster editor Priscilla Painton in the next few weeks, told POLITICO that Matalin has been helpful along the way by reading sections and offering comments. “Mary understands the audience and understands what goes into making a good book,” he said.

Threshold publisher Louise Burke, who runs the imprint from New York while Matalin pitches in from her New Orleans home, said the distinction between their imprint and others is that Threshold best understands the conservative book-buying audience — a key factor needed to keep the hits coming.

“This is an area where it really helps to be a believer,” said Burke, perhaps one of the few outspoken conservatives in Manhattan’s publishing scene. “I don’t feel you can be successful in this particular genre if you are opposed to the message.”

The notion of having true believers at the top has guided Threshold from the start. It was Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal — a “red diaper baby,” in Matalin’s opinion — who introduced the two women in 2005. “We were kindred spirits,” Burke recalled, “and we took it from there.”

With established conservative publishing houses like Regnery, in D.C., churning out books and a slew of big house imprints in New York, it was an auspicious moment to carve out a piece of the market. Shortly after Simon & Schuster’s announcement about creating Threshold, Newsweek’s Daniel Gross wrote skeptically that there weren’t likely to be many conservative best-sellers to support the imprints popping up. “Right books, wrong time,” he pronounced.

Upon launching the imprint shortly after Bush’s reelection, Burke said: “A lot of my liberal colleagues — judging by the looks on their faces — were shocked.”

Respectable publishing houses, the Upper West Side literati complained a few years back, were now turning their presses over to the Ann Coulters of the world, all in pursuit of profits. But these days, after layoffs and drops in sales, such criticism is less frequent.

“I think the industry is in such a bad place right now, and books are really hard to sell,” said Sara Nelson, recently the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly and now a columnist for The Daily Beast.